MUS31480 Music and Western Empires

Academic Year 2024/2025

The course explores the complex and unpredictable relationship that connected the history of Western music to the expansion and crisis of European imperialism between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries up to more recent times.
It questions the role that the Western music tradition from Monteverdi and Bach to Wagner and beyond played in both the expansion and the contraction and collapse of European imperialism as a tangible and discursive means of control and domination.
The course focuses mainly is on musical encounters with Western music outside Europe (the conquest of Mexico, Jesuit missions in Latin America, James Cook and the musical encounters in Polynesia, the musical colonisation of Central Africa) to explore the impact of Western music in non-European cultures.
Particular attention will be also given to musical encounters within the European borders: how did Europeans narrate, explore,receive and commented non-Western musical cultures? What was their impact in the Western musical tradition? From this bifocal perspective, the course offers a geographically broader and historically more critical look at the Western musical tradition outside Europe

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Curricular information is subject to change

Learning Outcomes:

- To rethink Western music as a global phenomenon beyond its traditional borders through its manifold encounters with cultures from South America to Asia and Central Africa from the XV century until more recent forms of imperialism.

- To analyse the role that Western music played in Europe’s long imperial history as a conveyor and sounding board for ideologies of cultural superiority, racial discrimination and Eurocentric progress.

- To compare different Western imperial experiences around the world and discuss the complex and often unpredictable relationship between music and power outside Europe up to more recent times.

- To engage critically with the main theoretical debates and methodological challenges posed by such perspective on Western music, from postcolonial studies to the more recent debates on the differences between global and world history.

Indicative Module Content:

Week 1: A global history of Western music? Debates, challenges and problems

Week 2: Audible powers: building empires through music

Week 3: The musical colonisation of Spanish América: evangelisation and social order

Week 4: “Educating” indígenos: Jesuit missions between Bolivia and the Philippines.

Week 5: ‘We want to be modern!’: Italian opera in postcolonial Mexico

Week 6: Other polyphonies: threats from the Far East during the Western Enlightenment

Week 7: Orientalism: staging the other in eighteenth-century Europe

Week 8: Music in a cage: ‘exotic’ sounds in the Paris World Expo of 1889

Week 9: Harmonic power: colonising central Africa through music (1850-1940)

Week 10: Staging Egypt: the case of Verdi's Aida

Week 11: Resisting stages: performing Traviata in Cape Town

Week 12: Project presentation

Student Effort Hours: 
Student Effort Type Hours
Lectures

22
Tutorial

11
Field Trip/External Visits

5
Specified Learning Activities

86
Autonomous Student Learning

76
Total

200
Approaches to Teaching and Learning:
Lectures followed by group discussions based on close readings of academic papers, original sources and the analysis of musical examples/videos 
Requirements, Exclusions and Recommendations

Not applicable to this module.


Module Requisites and Incompatibles
Not applicable to this module.
 
Assessment Strategy  
Description Timing Component Scale Must Pass Component % of Final Grade In Module Component Repeat Offered
Assignment(Including Essay): 3000 word essay on a topic of choice Week 12 Graded No

50

 No
Individual Project: Individual presentation (20 min) Week 10 Graded No

30

 No
Participation in Learning Activities: Participation in debates and other learning activities Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 9, Week 10, Week 11, Week 12 Graded No

20

 No

Carry forward of passed components
No
 
Remediation Type Remediation Timing
In-Module Resit Prior to relevant Programme Exam Board
Please see Student Jargon Buster for more information about remediation types and timing. 
Feedback Strategy/Strategies

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment

How will my Feedback be Delivered?

written feedback/out of class meetings